Tod Allman invited as a visiting professor to De La Salle University in the Philippines

Tod Allman and his family are in the Philippines for four months (January through April, 2014). Tod is teaching graduate computer science students how to use LA, and is also working with several linguistics students to build lexicons and grammars in LA for two languages spoken in the Philippines. He presented a paper entitled "Toward an Optimal Multilingual Natural Language Generator: Deep Source Analysis and Shallow Target Analysis" at the 10th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium (http://www.dlsu.edu.ph/conferences/nlp/2014/), and another paper entitled "Linguist's Assistant: In Search of the Source" at the 14th Philippine Computing Science Congress (http://pcsc2014.csp.org.ph/home). He will be presenting a four day workshop to linguistics students at the Univerity of the Philippines in Diliman so that they will be able to use LA to document several languages during their field projects. We hope these projects will provide a platform for describing many more languages spoken in the Philippines.

There are more than 180 languages spoken in the Philippines. Dozens of these languages have been documented, but dozens more remain. The members of LA hope to help with this documentation process. Tod Allman is currently developing a lexicon and grammar for Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines. That lexicon and grammar will serve as a template for creating lexicons and grammars for many other related languages spoken in the Philippines.